The figure at the root of so much global angst about coronavirus is currently 4.7 per cent.
That is the proportion of people, as of Sunday afternoon, who have died after being diagnosed with the virus — 32,137 out of the 685,623 who have tested positive for Covid-19 around the world.
It compares with a death rate of around 0.1 per cent for seasonal flu and 0.2 per cent for pneumonia in high-income countries. However, 4.7 per cent is not only changeable but frustratingly unreliable, both for governments seeking to calibrate their policy response and for citizens trying to gauge how much they should worry.
The proportion of people who have died from the disease varies strikingly from country to country. Researchers warn that there are so many uncertainties — not least over the true number of infections — that it remains almost impossible to draw firm conclusions about the death rate.
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Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies programme, has outlined four factors that might contribute to the differing mortality rates: who becomes infected, what stage the epidemic has reached in a country, how much testing a country is doing, and how well different healthcare systems are coping.
But there are other sources of doubt too, including how many coronavirus victims would have died of other causes if no pandemic had occurred. In a typical year, about 56m people die around the world — an average of about 153,000 per day.
Insufficient testing
Arguably the biggest unknown about Covid-19 is the true number of people worldwide who have contracted the virus. Without that information no accurate death rate can be calculated.
Many infected people will display either mild or no symptoms, and will remain absent from the data unless they are tested. Since resources are limited and different countries are testing to different extents, the size of the information gap varies from place to place.
John Ioannidis, a professor of epidemiology at Stanford University, has branded the data we have about the epidemic “utterly unreliable.” “We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300,” he wrote last week. If thousands more people are surviving than we know about, then current mortality rate estimates are too high — perhaps by a large margin.
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have estimated that, in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, the likely death rate was 1.4 per cent — much lower than the previous estimate of 4.5 per cent, which was calculated using official statistics on the region’s cases and deaths.
In the U.K., where the government has been criticised for a slow initial response, only the most serious cases are being tested. In total 1,231 people have died out of 19,758 confirmed cases, giving a death rate of 6.2 per cent.
Rosalind Smyth, professor of child health at UCL, said official U.K. coronavirus data was “so misleading that it should not be used”. Using conservative estimates, the true number of people infected “is likely to be 5-10 times higher”, she said.
© ERIKA SANTELICES/afp/AFP via Getty Images People wear face masks as a preventive measure against the spread of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, while walking in a street of Santo Domingo on March 30, 2020.
That is the proportion of people, as of Sunday afternoon, who have died after being diagnosed with the virus — 32,137 out of the 685,623 who have tested positive for Covid-19 around the world.
It compares with a death rate of around 0.1 per cent for seasonal flu and 0.2 per cent for pneumonia in high-income countries. However, 4.7 per cent is not only changeable but frustratingly unreliable, both for governments seeking to calibrate their policy response and for citizens trying to gauge how much they should worry.
The proportion of people who have died from the disease varies strikingly from country to country. Researchers warn that there are so many uncertainties — not least over the true number of infections — that it remains almost impossible to draw firm conclusions about the death rate.
[Gallery] Hilarious Airport Moments Captured On Camera
See More Sponsored by Too Cool 2 Be True
Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies programme, has outlined four factors that might contribute to the differing mortality rates: who becomes infected, what stage the epidemic has reached in a country, how much testing a country is doing, and how well different healthcare systems are coping.
But there are other sources of doubt too, including how many coronavirus victims would have died of other causes if no pandemic had occurred. In a typical year, about 56m people die around the world — an average of about 153,000 per day.
Insufficient testing
Arguably the biggest unknown about Covid-19 is the true number of people worldwide who have contracted the virus. Without that information no accurate death rate can be calculated.
Many infected people will display either mild or no symptoms, and will remain absent from the data unless they are tested. Since resources are limited and different countries are testing to different extents, the size of the information gap varies from place to place.
John Ioannidis, a professor of epidemiology at Stanford University, has branded the data we have about the epidemic “utterly unreliable.” “We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300,” he wrote last week. If thousands more people are surviving than we know about, then current mortality rate estimates are too high — perhaps by a large margin.
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have estimated that, in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, the likely death rate was 1.4 per cent — much lower than the previous estimate of 4.5 per cent, which was calculated using official statistics on the region’s cases and deaths.
In the U.K., where the government has been criticised for a slow initial response, only the most serious cases are being tested. In total 1,231 people have died out of 19,758 confirmed cases, giving a death rate of 6.2 per cent.
Rosalind Smyth, professor of child health at UCL, said official U.K. coronavirus data was “so misleading that it should not be used”. Using conservative estimates, the true number of people infected “is likely to be 5-10 times higher”, she said.
© ERIKA SANTELICES/afp/AFP via Getty Images People wear face masks as a preventive measure against the spread of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, while walking in a street of Santo Domingo on March 30, 2020.
